Mapr Certified Spark Developer (MCSD) guide

Mapr Certified Spark Developer (MCSD) guide

Yes finally I did it 🙂 After couple of months preparation I am finally Mapr certified spark developer. I wrote the exam on Nov 2016. Spark certification is sponsored by many organizations DataBricks, Mapr, Hortonworks, Cloudera… the DataBricks and Mapr are the popular one, I am bias towards both providers and I chose to Mapr because my organization is using Mapr distribution.

If you are planning to write MCSD then read apache spark wiki thoroughly and have hands on experience too.

The major topics MCSD covers:
http://learn.mapr.com/free-spark-certification-study-guide/60807

Load and inspect data.

Build an Apache spark application.

Working with Pair RDD.

Monitor Spark application.

Working with Data frames.

Spark Streaming

Advance Machine Learning programming.

Pointers to start Prepration:

The Apache spark wiki has covered all the topics in depth, throughly study it.

The overall exam is divided into set of topics listed above, with 2 hrs time slot for all the topics. Each topic has fixed set of questions so assign time slot(in minutes) for each section, the reason is as you move to next topic you are not allowed to browse previous topic and don’t assign uniformlytime slot for each topic because few of the topics has less number of questions than others.

index

topic

time slot

(in minutes)

percentage

1

Load and inspect data.

30

24%

2

Build an Apache spark application.

15

14%

3

Working with Pair RDD.

20

17%

4

Monitor Spark application.

15

14%

5

Working with Data frames.

12

10%

6

Spark Streaming

12

10%

7

Advance Machine Learning programming.

12

10%

Most of the questions were in scala given with code snippet, so you practice scala basics.

Useful tips:

In first section majority of the questions based on PairRDD, practice all pairRDD: groupByKey, reduceByKey, combineByKey: